One Man’s Quest to Change the Way We Die

January 4, 2017

(New York Times) – Now Miller also seemed to be on the cusp of modest celebrity. He’d started speaking about death and dying at medical schools and conferences around the country and will soon surface in Oprah’s living room, chatting about palliative care on her “Super Soul Sunday” TV show. Several of Miller’s colleagues described him to me as exactly the kind of public ambassador their field needed. “What B.J. accomplishes is to talk about death without making it sound scary and horrible,” Rita Charon, a professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical School, says. “We know from seeing him standing in front of us that he has suffered. We know that he has been at the brink of the abyss that he’s talking about. That gives him an authority that others may not have.”

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